Duke's decision spineless

What a crock. Duke University had a chance to do the right thing last week, but instead it did the white thing.

Don't look at me like that. In picking David Cutcliffe as the next head football coach at Duke, athletic director Joe Alleva played it safe and predictable.

In other words, he punked out, just as I knew he would.

I guess it's progress that Alleva actually interviewed a couple of brothers. For him, that's bold -- especially when you look at the Duke athletic department and the absence of color therein. The notable exception is assistant basketball coach Johnny Dawkins who, if there's a basketball god, will slide over one chair and lead the program when Mike Krzyzewski retires.

Alleva invited UCLA's recently ousted head coach Karl Dorrell to campus for a cup-a-joe and even had former N.C. Central head coach Rod Broadway (now at Grambling) over to visit before picking Cutcliffe.

Cutcliffe said at the news conference that Alleva called him Tuesday and asked whether he were interested in the gig. Check this out: That's the same day Bobby Johnson declared he was staying at Vanderbilt, leaving Broadway and Dorrell -- two brothers, imagine that -- as the leading candidates.

Cutcliffe might turn out to be a great coach. That won't change the fact that Alleva made what my colleague Caulton Tudor called "the safe, comfortable choice." It was business as usual, business as it has been the last 22 times Duke hired a football coach.

Listening to Duke President Richard Brodhead and Alleva at the news conference, one would've thought they were talking about Rod Broadway. Brodhead, for instance, praised Cutcliffe for his "intuition of this place."

Say, Dick, I'll bet his intuition -- whatever you mean by that -- isn't as great as Broadway's, who has coached and won at Duke.

I'm disappointed that Broadway, whom I've known since he was an assistant coach at UNC, didn't get the job, but I'm not surprised. Alleva has never been much of a risk-taker or leader. Why start now?

Neither Alleva nor the Duke sports information department returned my calls Monday.

At a Durham tennis court one warm day last week, some players were excitedly discussing who would be a better fit for Duke, Dorrell or Broadway. Listening to them talk, you'd have thought that both men had a real shot at the job. To me, though, the discussion was the pigskin equivalent of debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

As is customary, Alleva used the news conference to tell why Cutcliffe was the perfect choice. He owed it to us to tell why Rod Broadway wasn't.

The dude has won almost everywhere he has been -- a national championship as an assistant to Steve Spurrier at Florida and an ACC championship with Spurrier at Duke. His head coaching record at NCCU and Grambling is 41-15.

Indeed, about the same time Alleva and Brodhead were congratulating themselves on their choice, Broadway was playing in the Southwestern Conference Championship game in his first season at Grambling with a team that last year was 3-8.

So yeah, Joe, tell us why Broadway didn't get the job. Better yet, tell him.